Blinkx, the largest video search engine on the internet, has announced a deal with digital entertainment services company RealNetworks to utilise its RealPlayer media player online.RealPlayer, which competes mainly with Windows Media Player, will now have a video search box embedded in the window powered by blinkx, which searches some 12 million hours of online video.
Currently, blinkx manages around four million online searches every day, although the integration into the RealPlayer application is likely to push this figure much higher, as the media player alone is downloaded around 1.5 million times a day.
"The new RealPlayer will give people the ability to easily download non-DRM protected videos from thousands of sites, so giving our users access to a best-in-class video search experience is critical," said Jeff Chasen, vice president of RealPlayer for RealNetworks.
"By teaming up with blinkx, we now deliver their powerful video search engine directly to our users."
With YouTube acquired by Google last year, online searching of video content on the web has been put at the "centre" of the eleventh version of RealPlayer in a bid to help obtain a share of the burgeoning video search market, which operates in a different way to common search techniques.
Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of blinkx, said: "Through blinkx's patented speech and pattern recognition technologies, we will be offering their millions of users the most advanced tool for finding videos online."
He added: "Obviously there is going to be more and more video online but technologically it is quite challenging to search through it all. It is not the same as reading words off the page."
